Skip to content
Shawords

Quote#Politics & Power

What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land,…

Quote byThomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay · 1800–1859

Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Letter to Zachary Macaulay (8 September 1821), quoted in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Volume I: 1807–February 1831, ed. Thomas Pinney (1974), p. 163.

English (original)

What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land, Greece.—The principles of taste, the finest models of composition, the doctrines and the glorious examples to which we owe political freedom, the arts, the sciences, architecture, sculpture, every thing that is great and splendid in literature and politics, must be considered as ultimately derived from that little peninsula.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

More from Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay